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Monthly Archives: May 2013

According to Vivid Sydney: “Sydney will once again be transformed into a spectacular canvas of light, music and ideas when Vivid Sydney takes over the city after dark from 24 May – 10 June 2013. Colouring the city with creativity and inspiration, Vivid Sydney highlights include the hugely popular immersive light installations and projections; performances from local and international musicians at Vivid LIVE at Sydney Opera House and the Vivid Ideas Exchange featuring public talks and debates from leading global creative thinkers.”

New South Wales Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner officially opened the fifth annual Vivid Sydney festival by lighting the sails of the Sydney Opera House to unveil a stunning visual feast of colour, movement and lighting artistry, with 3D-mapped light projections. The greatly expanded Vivid Sydney this year includes the lighting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the transformation of the Darling Harbour into a water theatre.
“The Vivid Light footprint has tripled in size and for the first time Sydney’s Harbour Bridge will come alive with a spectacular installation created through a collaboration between Vivid partner Intel Australia and Sydney’s 32 Hundred Lighting, with support from North Sydney Council, in an interactive programmable lighting installation on the bridge’s western face, controlled by the public from a touch screen located on the Luna Park boardwalk.
With a record number of applications to be part of Vivid Light, one-third of all light installations are from overseas artists, demonstrating the unique platform Vivid Sydney offers to engage with the best of the global creative economy and foster international business opportunities. “Vivid Sydney is where technology, commerce and art intersect—delivering real business outcomes. With 37 per cent of Australia’s creative industries located in NSW, supporting creative industries through events like Vivid Sydney is key to the NSW Government’s strategy to grow the NSW economy,” Mr Stoner said.
“In 2012 Vivid Sydney attracted more than 500,000 spectators and we anticipate numbers will reach well over 550,000 in 2013, injecting around $10 million in new money into the NSW economy.”
Have look at the timelapse video that shows the Canvas of Light that has been projected on the Sydney Opera House: [vimeo vimeo.com/66892937 w=600&h=450]

Recently Google purchased Makani Power, a start-up that developes Airborne Wind Power turbines. Airborne Power could be an attractive and powerful alternative for wind turbines. Ever more the installation of wind turbines around cities causes discussions about their visual and environmental impact. The ‘kites’ of Makani might offer a solution. According to Makani its “Airborne Wind Turbine (AWT) can create inexpensive energy, in more locations than traditional wind turbines, because it flies where the wind is stronger and more consistent.” “The Makani AWT:

Produces power at up to half the cost of traditional wind turbines

Accesses the stronger and more consistent winds at altitude

90% less material than a conventional turbine, it is less expensive to build and install

Opens up large new areas of wind resource, including the vast resources offshore above deep water

Allows for deployment outside of visually or environmentally sensitive locations”

“A graphic illustrating turbine size from 1995-2015, which shows that although wind turbines have grown tremendously in rated output over the past decade, conventional turbine technology has a long way to go to reach the same resource as even first generation AWTs. (Source: Lance, Wiser, Hand. IEA Wind Task 26: The Past and Future Cost of Wind Energy, NREL TP-6A20-53510, 2012; Makani estimates)”

Client: Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment / Municipality of AlmereYear: 2012 Output: Spatial Economic Strategy / 5 Films
Project: For the main exhibition of the 5th International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam SmartCityStudio created five spatial economic strategies that conceptualise how 100.000 new jobs in Almere could be created. In dialogue with the municipality of the new town of Almere, entrepreneurs in the city and with the Dutch National government SmartCityStudio created five narratives around community wind power and algae production, small enterprises, healthcare, a special economic zone and an open economy. These Smart economic strategies should ‘liberate’ Almere from an outdated culture of control and create the conditions for citizens and entrepreneurs to act. SCS illustrated these strategies in five short films. Have a look at the film below or click one of the links.

Client: stichting Uitracel / district Saramacca, Surinam Year: 2013
Output: Public Space Strategy / Local Economic Dev. Strategy / Resource MobilisationProject: Creola Bright Future aims at the exploration of cultural value through the lens of public space in the former slave plantation of Creola, Surinam. Creola is a former slave plantation that has been erected in 1934 and thus exists 80 year in 2014. Inhabitants in the area and in the surroundings are descendants of the slaves of this plantation. The local community of Creola has a dual relation to the plantation having been unvoluntary offspring of this dark side of Surinam’s history. At the same time local inhabitants have developed local arts and crafts, regional architecture and agricultural production of indigenous food on the site of the former plantation. This all creates a accidental assemblage of historic landscape architectonic artefacts like sluices and waterways with hidden podisiri (acai berry’s) plantations , regional architecture and local crafts on the production of for example Korjalen, the typical Surinam boat type. Locals living in the area all have their own stories and knowledge on what has happened over history on the plantation.

This project will amplify local cultural values in the area and relate them to the experience of the area itself in order to rebuild a local identity for Creola. This together should provide a network of public spaces that offer opportunities for small entrepreneurial activities. The project develops an alternative public space strategy as opposed to the tabula rasa development that is common these days in the privatized society of Surinam. By exploring local stories and cultural production in the area CreolaBrightFuture rewrites the story of Creola people throught the experience of public space. Not as a historical analysis but as a basis for contemporary cultural production, education and small entrepreneurship.
Sources: SmartCityStudio Picture: Local Podisiri (acai berry’s) plantation hidden in the woods of Creola.

Client: Rotterdam Region, The Hague Region Year: 2010-2011, 2011-2012Project: Development of living environment indicators with the Rosetta method in order to regionally gear housing projects to one another. For decades housing in the Netherlands has been driven by quantitative supply. Now that the market came to a standstill local and regional governments rethink their housing projects in terms of demand instead of supply and in terms of quality instead of quantity. This requires fundamental other instruments to compare housing projects to one another. SmartCityStudio developed the Rosetta index: A set of indicators and a vocabulary to benchmark quality in the living environment. Rosetta is being built up in collaboration which each of the municipalities of the region. With Rosetta the political discussion on reduction and differentiation of housing projects can be aligned along a shared vocabulary and overview of projects. The Rosetta legend became the basis for ‘de Grote Woontest’, a consumer research on housing demand that involved over 15.000 inhabitants in the region.

Client: City of São Paulo Year: 2009-2013Project: Smart Informal Territories Lab Heliópolis (SITlab) works with the Prefeitura de Cidade de São Paulo, the local community and various ‘NGO’s’ on upgrading projects for the Favela Heliópolis where an estimated 190.000 people live without formally having an address. Inclusive planning instruments are essential for the upgrade of living standards and to solve underlying causes. The legalization of housing could help inhabitants to break out of a socio-economic spiral that is largely caused by having no legal address and by the extreme high costs of living in an ‘illegal city’. With SITlab Heliópolis the Universidade Presbiteriana MacKenzie São Paulo, Parsons the New School for Design and the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam work on plans and co-creative planning tools for the Favela that could be applied in other similar conditions in Brazil.

Client: Foundation Urbanism NOW / Creative Industries Fund Year: 2009-ongoing.Project: Biannual Award and communication platform for excellence in urban planning.
Rogier van den Berg, director of SmartCityStudio, founded the Biannual Award in 2009. In order to disperse intelligence on urban planning concepts among professionals and the government. Collaborating with Dutch Universities in urban planning to identify the best plans of young professionals the Biannual Award becomes an investigation on new trends and assignments for the future. The young professionals pitch their project in four-minute videos that can be viewed at www.stedenbouw.nu. Their projects are being evaluated by one hundred of the most influential professionals in urban planning which rate the projects with a score and an written argumentation. The winners are announced in a public debate on the future of our cities and receive assignments of public parties to work on in the following year.
Picture: Jan-Martijn Eekhof, winner 2012 and Henk Ovink, Deputy Director General Spatial Planning of the Netherlands.

As reported in the Economist this week, Ho Chi Minh City “must take drastic action to prevent flooding”. The low-lying city with over 8 million inhabitants could learn from the Dutch that developed Smart strategies to cope with peak levels in its rivers.
According to the Economist “yet nearly half of the city lies less than one metre above sea level…”and scientists say groundwater extraction in Ho Chi Minh City causes land subsidence may be having a huge unseen effect to the city of which nearly 70% is already vulnerable to extreme flooding.”…”Flood risks are rising in Ho Chi Minh City’s lower lying districts, in part because the property boom that accompanied Vietnam’s 2007 entry to the World Trade Organisation led many developers to build wherever they could” and because of “poor immigrants who build flimsy shacks in the city’s swampy outskirts”. Instead of only investing in a plan that comprises of over 170 km of dikes to protect urban areas Dutch strategies like the ‘Room for the River’ program might offer new useful insights in how to create flood-control solutions that are sustainable. The Dutch ‘Room for the River’ program is not fighting the water with investing in dikes that have to be heightened every decade. ‘Room for the River’ offers a dynamic systems that offers solutions for the increasing amounts of water in the Dutch rivers and the gradually subsiding land behind the dikes. The ‘Room for the River’ project literally creates more room for the river and with that guaranteeing the safety of over 4 million people living in risk areas along it. Work is carried out in more than 30 locations and interventions comprise of for example high water channels that branches of the river and offer separate routes for high water or temporary water storage areas.
Some of the interventions go hand in hand with the development of urban areas that take water management as a basis for urban planning. The ‘Room for the River’ program is more than progressive engineering. Above all it is a paradigm shift from a defensive ‘total control’ attitude towards a concept with a dynamic system that creates new spatial opportunities within the river landscape. The dynamics of the Dutch water system itself is accurately mapped by ‘Rijkswaterstaat’ the governmental department that is responsible for the design and maintenance of the main infrastructure facilities in the Netherlands. Reliable water data is of great importance for controlling the flood barriers, sluices and pumping stations and the assessment of water quality. Therefore ‘Rijkswaterstaat’s measures include the daily tides, wave height and water quality. They also calculate water levels and wave forecasts. Something for Ho Chi Minh City to have a look at. To have total control with ‘hardware’ like dikes only will on the long term be very money-consuming. The dynamic ‘Room for the River’ project together with accurate data on water levels (the ‘software’) will set the example for future flood-control solutions across the globe. For a short introduction on the ‘Room for the River’ project have a look at the corporate video of Rijkswaterstaat. Picture: Ho Chi Minh City by Brian K. Smith. Sources: SmartCityStudio, Rijkswaterstaat, the Economist.